Battered by the justice system, too

Nicole Ryan, who tried to hire a hit man to kill her abusive husband, attends a news conference at her lawyer's office in Halifax last Thursday. (ANDREW VAUGHAN / The Canadian Press)

THE Supreme Court of Canada got the decision right, but Friday’s high court ruling leaves many questions unanswered in the case of a battered Nova Scotia woman who tried to hire a hit man to kill her abusive husband.

Nicole Ryan Doucet was acquitted at trial, then on appeal, of counselling to commit murder by offering an undercover RCMP officer $25,000 in 2008 to murder Michael Ryan, the man who physically and mentally abused the southwestern Nova Scotia woman for more than a decade.

On Friday, however, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Ms. Doucet, whose lawyers had always argued she had acted under duress, was not entitled to use that defence.

Acting under duress, the court clarified, meant being coerced by one party to unwillingly commit a crime against a third party. But Mr. Ryan could not be both coercer and victim.

So Ms. Doucet’s defence, the court said, had to rest on self-defence.

The high court, however, also made the humane call — properly, in our view — to stay further court proceedings against Ms. Doucet, citing, among other factors, confusion over the law of duress, including the Crown’s shifting position, and RCMP inaction in response to the woman’s earlier, repeated requests for help.

The question of whether a battered woman’s attempt to hire a hit man to kill her abuser can be legally construed as self-defence, then, remains undecided.

Also unanswered is the damning question of why a brutalized wife turning to the police for protection was told her problems were a “civil matter,” leading the desperate woman, in the face of alleged death threats against her and their daughter by her husband, to try to hire a contract killer.

The Supreme Court noted that authorities seemed to react more quickly to protect Mr. Ryan, by setting up a sting operation, than to Ms. Doucet’s pleas for help during her husband’s reign of terror.

Ms. Doucet was, in effect, brutalized for many years by her husband, then had to endure almost five more years of court proceedings prosecuting her for the desperate actions she took — admittedly extreme — to protect herself and her daughter from harm.